Sex Bondage and Dog Cloning: Errol Morris Finds the Common Ground

*Courtesy of Sundance Selects.*Few directors push the limits of film genre more successfully than Errol Morris, whose newly released documentary, Tabloid, features a 300-lb. Mormon tied to a bed in an English country cottage, a former beauty queen whose unrequited love drives her to kidnapping, and a cloned dog named Booger.

As documentaries go, Tabloid is anything but dry or staid. In fact, it’s the sexiest film to date from Morris, who directed The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, and Standard Operating Procedure.

The film focuses on Joyce McKinney, who became a tabloid sensation in the late 1970s for allegedly kidnapping the love of her life, Kirk Anderson, and having her way with him in a love cottage in Devon, England. McKinney, who narrates the frightful storyline with a Southern accent that’s as sugary as pecan pie, claims Anderson was later compelled by the L.D.S. church to accuse her of rape. She fled England after the resulting trial (in a disguise you won’t believe) and returned to a life of seclusion.

We spoke with Morris about self-fulfilling prophecies, searching for the truth in tawdry places, and McKinney’s very vocal reactions to the movie.
VF Daily: This story unfolded more than three decades ago. Why return to it now?Errol Morris: I didn’t know about it 30 years ago. I found out about it recently because there was an article in the newspaper about a woman who cloned her pit bull, Booger. I was intrigued because there were clearly two elements to the story: there was the dog cloning, which was the lead, and then buried at the bottom of the article was the suggestion that possibly this person was connected to a 30-year-old sex-in-chains story. That caught my attention.

What was so appealing about Joyce to you?

It’s hard to know when suddenly a story comes alive. Lots of stories interest me. I have to say, lots of tabloid stories interest me. A lot of my movie ideas have come from tabloid stories.

The tabloid idea is the beginning of everything, as if it’s the way into some very strange landscape. I got interested in the [Joyce McKinney] story because of the dog cloning and the sex-in-chains story, but I had no idea what I was getting myself into. The story just created itself around me, and was constantly surprising. I mean, how would you ever in a million years anticipate some of the things in this movie?

How did you track Joyce down in the first place?

She wasn’t that hard to find, the first time around. She was in North Carolina, presumably living with her parents, but I don’t know for sure. She talked to me on the phone, but she didn’t want to be filmed. So I left it at that. Then I was asked to do a series for Showtime. Originally the entire series was going to be called Tabloid. I was going to take various tabloid stories and turn them into television programs. That’s why I started to think again about doing something with Joyce. It was going to be my first [episode]. So we re-contacted her and we found her in southern California, and she was interested in coming in.

How many days did you interview her? Was it all in one sitting?

It was all in one sitting, for a good part of the day. But the story unfolded. I have this principle about interviewing: if you know what you’re going to hear in advance, why bother doing the interview? It should be investigative. You should be surprised. Also, one of my great pleasures as a filmmaker is the language that people use. Joyce is really smart; she’s an extraordinarily romantic character. A couple of people question, though: does she really have that high IQ? But hey, guess what: just listen to her! She’s really, really smart.

The result is that she’s really good at manipulating her audience. One of the tabloid writers at the trial says she had the jury laughing and crying with her.

She says, at one point, “Thank God for all those years of drama school.”

When she says that, though, she’s making herself more unreliable than she already is.

Yes and no. I don’t think we arrive at truth through one person and one person’s account of anything. Just in the last day we’ve been privy to a hotel maid and the ex-head of the I.M.F. providing disparate accounts of what happened in a hotel room.

I’ve been struck—and this is true of many of the stories that I’ve investigated over the years—by the fact that people do, in fact, tell different stories [but that] doesn’t prevent us from getting at the truth
The one thing that we do know about ourselves is that we’re all unreliable narrators—you, me, and everyone else. What is interesting is to see the distance between what really happened—to the extent that we can know it—and how people wished things happened. Our enormous desire to reconstruct reality to suit our own purposes, that pressure. And I feel the pressure so strongly in Tabloid. Whether it’s the journalistic pressure to provide an account that’s going to please an editor. My favorite line in Tabloid is Peter Tory’s line: “I think it was ropes, but chains sounds better.” It’s a great line.

Tabloid reporters aren’t exactly the most reliable sources, are they?

You might say that tabloid reporters are less trustworthy, and this is going to get me into terrible trouble, [but] I think tabloid captures the essence of journalism. Yes, it might be sensationalistic; yes, it might be lurid; yes, it might be tawdry. But it’s that weird combination of trying to interest the public in a story. We feel the tug of the story . . . It leads us in, and then what for me becomes interesting is seeing what really is there, or at least trying to find out what’s really there, to capture the complexities of the story. This is an example of a tabloid story that, to me, is endlessly complex.

I heard an interview where you say Joyce has “depth.” What did you mean by that?

On one hand, her story, her self-constructed story, is like a fable, it’s like a fairytale. At the very beginning and very end of Tabloid is this material shot by Trent Harris in the early 80s, and there is Joyce reading from her unfinished book. There’s this realization that, and I’m talking about myself, the realization that, “Oh my God, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” She’s reading this story and the story comes true over the next 30 years. What’s that about? And maybe I jump at the hyperbolic interpretation: are we all like this? Do we all write out a script for our lives and then become trapped in it? Joyce made reference to a [Theodore] Dreiser story that she read in high school, which I dutifully read and loved.

Well, she’s kind of her own American Tragedy.

It seems that part of the Dreiser idea is that characters never get what they want. They’re always thwarted by circumstances beyond their control, by the nature of the world itself. There seems to be a tragic element built into the very structure of reality. So I have this picture of Joyce reading “Second Choice." It’s really fabulous. There’s a young woman who falls in love with a man. It starts off with this exchange of letters, letters from the man to her. She’s in love with him; he’s not in love with her. She vows to herself that she’s not going to become like her mother, she’s not going to settle for some boring guy and become trapped in a life of broth. There’s a guy who loves her who she does not love, and she settles for that guy and the implication is she becomes like her mother. A Dreiserian fable, if there ever was one. So Joyce reads this in high school and says, “I’m not going to be like that. That’s not happening to me. I’m never settling for my second choice.” And she doesn’t. Then I wondered whether the outcome of Joyce’s version of Dreiser, the Joyce fable, was far more terrifying.

Unless you call Booger her second choice, whom she settles on.

You’re absolutely right. I had trouble with audiences. At the very beginning people would look at rough cuts of Tabloid and they would echo Joyce’s sentiments in the movie. They would say, “Well, I don’t see the relationship between the 32-year-old sex-in-chains story and dog cloning.” And to me the two were inextricably connected.

She can’t let go of that dog, so much so that after it dies, she clones it.

I invited her up and I was happy to be onstage with her and I hope that this is repeated. Because she can be annoyed with the movie. She could feel that the movie doesn’t do exactly what she wanted it to do. But it still is her movie. So I don’t in any way want her to be excluded.

You do treat it as her story. Kirk Anderson’s perspective is absent.

Yes. Did I want to interview Kirk Anderson? I did. It would be irresponsible not to try to interview him.

Did you meet him or get in touch with him at all?

No. But we found out where he lived and we sent registered mail but we never heard back from him. We tried to contact various people in the L.D.S. church, particularly the church elder who was present in the U.K. when all of this went down in the 1970s. But we never got a response. There’s a fact of the matter—things happen, there’s a real world. Now the accounts that people give of what they think happened may all differ, and they may all be wrong. But that doesn’t mean that something didn’t happen. When I was making The Thin Blue Line I was fond of pointing out [that] someone killed police officer Robert Woods—someone killed a cop, and someone pulled the trigger. It’s not up for grabs. It’s our job to investigate and try to find out. But here’s where the problems arise in the investigation of anything that’s in the past. Information gets destroyed or lost, or evidence is never collected and vanishes.

[Joyce’s friend and accomplice] K.J. died. I couldn’t interview K.J., as much as I might like to interview him. And Kirk Anderson won’t speak. Reliable or unreliable as a narrator, he never provided narration. So all I have is Joyce. It’s an interesting problem because you have a net cast around that love cottage and the remaining mystery of what actually went down inside that love cottage.

Errol Morris'sTabloidpremieres in limited release on Friday, July 15. See the trailer below.